Gameboy Player and colors?

[noiseredux]

I had never really thought about this but...

tonight I popped Metroid II into my Gameboy Player. It was my first time playing the game since it came out! And as the GBPlayer fired up, I reminisced about how I remembered the game: pea green. I wondered what strange color scheme the GBPlayer would assign to the cart. And then I realized... Samus looked like Samus! Yellow and red.

This got me thinking, how did the GBPlayer KNOW what colors Samus was supposed to be? The game was from well before the advent of Super Gameboy (which would port our GB games to one of four color schemes that were never quite right). So... what's the deal?

[pepharytheworm]

You know I was thinking the same thing yesterday when I was playing Dreamland. Kirby was pink. On the supergameboy you could pick your color scheme.

[noiseredux]

Right! That's how I remember it... I would try to get Link to be in green clothes or whatever. But nowadays I take for granted that the GBPlayer just knows what to do with the colors.

[MrPopo]

The Gameboy Color pallets included a few ones that were specifically programmed for early Nintendo-made Gameboy games, like Metroid II.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gameboy_Co ... _Boy_games

[noiseredux]

The Gameboy Color pallets included a few ones that were specifically programmed for early Nintendo-made Gameboy games, like Metroid II.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gameboy_Co ... _Boy_games

wow!

"In addition, most Game Boy games published by Nintendo have a special palette that is enabled when no buttons are pressed. Any game that does not have a special palette will default to the dark green (Right + A) palette. Notable games that do have preset palettes are Metroid II: Return of Samus, Kirby's Dream Land 2, Super Mario Land, Tetris and the Wario Land series."

Thanks, PoPo, I never knew this!

I was also sort of intrigued by the Tetris color scheme on my GBA (as GB Tetris is the definitive version, and only version I play to this day).

[Hobie-wan]

That is pretty cool. I had suspected something was going on when Metroid II came up the right color in a GBA SP.

[HellHammer]

I had a bit of an obsession with this exact subject about 6 months ago.

I found that Gunpei Yokoi was the producer for Metroid II and is also said to have had a hand in creating the Super GameBoy. I'm convinced that the hidden color palates that PoPo mentioned was a concept of his. As it happens, Metroid II, in red with yellow shoulders, is even on the cover of the Super GameBoy box. In addition, I came across an article that mentions Nintendo were not quite satisfied with GameBoy titles that didn't have the original preset colors and intended to make a DX version of Metroid II. Obviously that never materialized, but it's interesting to note that the only games remade 'DX' were big hits (Tetris, Link's Awakening) originally without the color pallet.

Also, I found this neat chart for the colors:


I'm glad other people find this kind of thing as intriguing as I do!

[noiseredux]

I do find it very intriguing. But the pic you posted is a big black box?

[MrPopo]

The picture works for me. Maybe your browser doesn't support png images.

[HellHammer]

I do find it very intriguing. But the pic you posted is a big black box?

Hmm...It's a chart of each color (in screen shots) for the GB color pallet.
See if you can mess with your browser. If you still can't see it, and you'd still like to, I'll just PM you the image.